Obama aides: “Charm offensive is a joke”

President Obama for the first time appears to be making a full-fledged effort to extend an olive branch to congressional Republicans, dining with a group of GOP senators last week and penciling in a lunch date with Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. His advisers are not pleased by the move, according to the National Journal’s Ron Fournier.

“This is a joke. We’re wasting the president’s time and ours,” a senior White House official told Fournier of the president’s outreach efforts. “I hope you all (in the media) are happy because we’re doing it for you.”

Other current and former administration officials made similar remarks to reporters and openly on Twitter.

In other words, the dinner, the lunches, all the “reaching out” are all for show, probably more due to his tanking poll numbers than with any real desire to reach a compromise solution to our nation’s fiscal mess. But, we all knew that, right? Obama’s overriding strategic goal is income redistribution, followed by the managed decline of the United States into a West European-style social democracy. Tactically, he needs to improve his poll numbers to give his side a reasonable chance of taking the House and keeping the Senate in 2014. Serious reform of the kind we really need on taxes, entitlements, and government spending, would endanger those goals. Hence, he’ll never agree to them.

So, really, these aides and former aides are just guilty of speaking the truth. But there’s no way Obama is thrilled to have his cynical strategy exposed so publicly, by his own people.

“Obama’s overriding strategic goal is income redistribution, followed by the managed decline of the United States into a West European-style social democracy.”

Much too much credit given here, Phineas. I could (and have) reasonable argue that his overriding strategic goal is to punish this country by making it a second-rate third-world country, with no global power and certainly no means of effective defense against those who covet our resources.

He’s got his, and he’s got ours now, so after his last term is up he can rub elbows with whatever imam or jackwad dictator in the world he wants to.